Earlier this week I had the good fortune to attend an advance screening of Brokeback Mountain (www.brokebackmountainmovie.com). The benefit event for my new employer, Frameline LGBT Film Festival, featured a live talk by director Ang Lee, who was charming, humble and clearly an artist's artist. It was a very special evening.

Like so many of us, I have been chomping at the bit to see this movie for over a year. The chance to watch Jake Gyllenhaal as a gay cowboy (with the none-too-subtle name of Jack Twist)? The only thing that could have completed the uber-fantasy for this bi girl is if Jake's sister Maggie was in the flick as well, playing, say a tough ranch woman. (My close friends tease me incessantly about my dual Gyllenhaal crush. In fact, the morning of the screening, my girlfriend sent me an email with the subject line "U Pick" and three photos: Her, Jake, and Maggie. Can't I have all three?)

But I digress...

I had read the story by Annie Proulx several years ago when I reviewed the book, Close Range, for The Oregonian. I was floored by the story then and I knew with Ang Lee directing, I'd be leveled by the film version as well. And I was. You will be too. The film does something the exquisite, award-winning short story did in a quieter way: it creates a visual epic re-envisions American mythologies of the West, masculinity and queerness in a way we have not seen before. [Esteemed film critic B. Ruby Rich planted this idea in my head in her excellent preview in The Guardian]

For all my Gyllenhaalism, it is Heath Ledger who I found most riveting, mainly because his role as Ennis del Mar is that of the silent, idealistic yet emotionally boxed-in cowboy I grew up around. I was raised in Wyoming in the 1970s and '80s, during the latter time period of Ennis and Jack's story. Ledger's interpretation of Ennis is pitch-perfect. In Ledger's Ennis, I saw my stepdad and his friends, the proud fathers and hardworking horsemen whose blood ran thick with a certain inherent sadness, whose eyes mirrored back the Western horizon they were always scanning, whose toughened bodies embodied a dying breed. I know I sound overly-romantic, but these people exist and with them all the pathos and raw, hardscrabble beauty of the land they inhabit.

The film, like the story, has many layers to it, and certainly one is that of a good old-fashioned tragic love story. On another level the film asks us to look under the surface, to look at the passion men [and I'm speaking in specific gendered terms here] feel for one another, for their youth, their freedom, their land. The film begs the question, What would Jack and Ennis's world look like if they could live together passionately and freely, without the fear of being bludgeoned to death? How would our Western mythology be different if men of any sexual orientation didn't have to have their love for one another beaten or shamed out of them? How would communities, marriages, and working and living on the land itself be different? Importantly, how much more freedom would women have?

Can we rewrite those mythologies? Can we, like Annie Proulx has, rewrite the landscape to include the buried, silenced, omitted passions that, if freed, might lead men to live fuller more compassionate lives?

When I had the chance to shake Ang Lee's hand after the film, all I could manage to say was "Thank you for making this film."

Written by Meg Daly

Meg is a freelance writer, newly transplanted to San Francisco. She is the former features editor at Just Out, Portland's queer newsmagazine. Her articles have appeared in national and regional press, including Tikkun, Grist online magazine, Punk Planet, Portland Monthly, Oregon Business, and Willamette Week. She is the editor of two anthologies on women's friendships, including Surface Tension: Love, Sex, and Politics Between Lesbians and Straight Women.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 01, 2005 at 11:53 AM. Want to discuss? Leave a comment below.